Essential WordPress Plugins for Beginners

WordPress is one of the easiest Blogging Platform to use even for beginners. The use of WordPress Plugins lets you add functionality you need for your blog and can be useful for enhancing current features and also adding new features.

Jetpack, from Akismet, offers up a number of features that were previously only available to WordPress.com users. This includes WordPress.com stats, sharing tools, spelling and grammar checker, comment features, subscriptions, a carousel, enhanced distribution, custom CSS, WP.me short links, shortcode embeds, and much more.

Google XML Sitemaps has been around for awhile, and it’s a great plugin for generating a sitemap for use with Google Webmaster Tools, and to make it easier for other search engines to index your site. It supports all kinds of WP generated pages, custom URLs, and more. And it notifies all the major search engines when you create new content, helping your site be more thoroughly indexed.

This plugin is very useful to increase comments on your blog, it will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or Digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail content with a simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

All in One SEO Pack optimizes your site for search engines, and includes Google Analytics support, support for custom post types, integration for WP E-Commerce, support for CMS-style installations, automatically generated Meta tags, and support for canonical links. It will work right out of the box, or advanced users can fine-tune the functionality. It’s also backwards-compatible with a lot of other plugins, including Ultimate Tag Warrior and Auto Meta.

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

About The Author

Sean J is a web designer and developer. He currently is founder of designsave.com, a helpful blog where you can find free wordpress themes, graphic resources, best web tutorials and tips. When not in front of computer screen, he enjoys fishing, travelling and spending time with his Family.